Hello! Its been a full year since the demo for Diviner was released. Since its the anniversary, I wanted to share some important news concerning Diviner and its development:
I am now working full time on Diviner's development, and Diviner is roughly 30% complete in its current state.
A little bit of backstory about what has been going on behind the scenes and what led me to start working again on this project, since my last update made it clear I would be dropping the project due to lack of funding/feasibility.
I've been in the game's industry for roughly 6 years. and I've spent the past 5 years at a great Indie company working full time as a 3D generalist. If you are not familiar with the current state of the industry, things are not going well. Funding options are disappearing, publisher scopes are narrowing and budgets are shrinking, and I unfortunately was laid off back in April along with a lot of my coworkers. After I had released the demo back in August after working part time on the demo for over a year, and spent about a month improving it and taking in feedback, I put together a pitch deck and sent it off to a number of publishers who I thought would be a good fit for the game. The feedback was fairly consistent, it wasn't going to be published, and looking down the barrel of working on this game solo for 4 - 6 years to make it a fully playable product, I instead opted to let it go, and try working on some smaller projects. I'd spent the past 6 months between then and April messing about with a number of small ideas, a card game, a little nightmares clone, some other vague ideas loosely inspired by what was popular at the time. I found myself getting bored of them one after another, and when I suddenly had all the time in the world after losing my job, I realized I wanted to work on Diviner again. But it would have to change if I wanted to make it realistic for me to develop this myself within a few years.
So that brings me to today. I've been working on Diviner, again, full time, for the past 4 months. I've restarted the game's code base and project from scratch to avoid some of the mistakes I made with the demo, and I've added a considerable amount of content to expand the first area. I've also made some large changes to the exploration and gameplay, some out of necessity for scope, but most to improve and streamline the game while still retaining its core. I've even been tinkering with a very fun system for creating your character's build that feels very dynamic and I am excited to show more of that at a later date. Currently, with all the work I've put in so far, the game is basically 30% complete, with about 4 hours of content to be played through, and more on the way.
With how much time has passed, I'm aware that the audience for this game has probably shrunken significantly, and I'll need to put more effort into marketing and sharing what I've been working on to get people excited for this game again. For the few of you who are still here, thank you. I wanted to make this post to give you an update, and to share what will be coming. For now, I am delisting the demo as it no longer accurately portrays the game in its current state. I'm considering creating a discord, and if I do, I'll post the old Demo executable there. I have updated the main store page with new screenshots of the new gameplay/exploration that you can browse through if you want an idea of what the game looks like now. I am hoping to have a new teaser trailer by this February, however a playable demo will most likely not be available anytime soon, as I am heads down on producing as much art and content as possible to keep the game moving forward.
I'm very excited to be working on this game again, and I hope you all are excited too! More to come, I'll be making an effort to post weekly updates on X/Bluesky. Here's a little screenshot of a new combat scenario:
